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Sonnet 60 of Olive, the first in a suite of fifty-six new poems added in 1550, addresses Ronsard directly: “Divin Ronsard, qui de l’arc à sept cordes,/Tiras premier au but de la memoire” ‘Divine Ronsard, who on your bow with seven strings aim as the first one at the target of memory.’ At that time Ronsard had just made his debut with a Hymne de France (privilege November 1549; written for the newly crowned Henri II in praise of France, “aux belles villes,/Et son renom” ‘with its splendid cities and its renown,’ ll. 20‒21) and Les quatre premiers livres des Odes (privilege 10 January 1550). Urging him to leave his placid birthplace near Vendôme beside the lesser Loir River, the sonnet summons Ronsard southward to the site of royal chateaux such as Amboise and Blois and, further downstream, to the site of Du Bellay’s birthplace at Liré near Angers: “Laisse ton Loir haultain de ta victoire,/Et vien sonner au rivage de Loire” ‘Leave your Loir, proud in your victory, and come sound your music on the shore of the Loire.’ Sonnet 61 with the speaker’s address to his own poetry (“Allez mes vers” ‘Go my verse’) and sonnet 62 with its national pantheon of French poets follow. The latter ends with an oblique commendation of Ronsard “qui a faict lire . . ./Le vieil honneur de l’une at l’autre lire” ‘who has barely made us read the old honor and the one and the other lyre.’ The collective involvement of these poems with Du Bellay’s relationship to Ronsard and their respective Petrarchan origins raises questions of poetic identity (just what do both poets owe to their Italian predecessor?) and of larger patriotic purpose (what goals does each strive for as a French poet, and how do they differ?)1 138 Mon semblable, mon frère Du Bellay and Ronsard 7 Already the report that Du Bellay, echoing the formula of a pastoral invitation to poetic competition, is coaxing Ronsard to leave the Loir for the Loire and make legible a “vieil honneur” implies some difference between them. Their likeness diverges in their public and private personae. Du Bellay fantasizes for himself a social responsibility to speak on behalf of a greater corporate entity, the emergent French nation. Ronsard fantasizes only a personal ambition to triumph as premier court poet. Du Bellay highlights these differences most dramatically in the poems of Les Regrets which contrast his hardships abroad with Ronsard’s ease at Henri II’s court, but he also implies them in the new Olive, published at a stressful time in his life marked by the onset of tubercular illness, his failure to secure patronage from the king’s sister Marguerite de France, and adverse criticism of his Deffence by Barthélemy Aneau.2 Acknowledging Ronsard as a stupendously resourceful poet, Du Bellay finds himself acting out conflicts where previously there seemed to be none. Sonnet 60 frames this relationship with Ronsard in a Petrarchan context. Here it would appear that personal loyalties and allegiances come undone as a progressively corporate national sentiment overtakes Du Bellay but not Ronsard, so that the poet of Olive begins to question his friend’s dedication to patriotic ideals. Ronsard would encourage his own renown as a poet apart from the fray, resistant to the fissiparous tensions of public life. Two years after the expanded Olive, Ronsard published his first collection of sonnets, Les Amours (privilege September 1552), champing to respect the success of Du Bellay ’s Petrarchan debut. Significantly, the first poem in Ronsard’s collection echoes Petrarch’s sonnet 248, “Chi Vuol veder,” and, equally significantly, it displaces the beloved as its object of attention, replacing her with the poet himself: Qui voudra voyr comme un Dieu me surmonte Comme il m’assault, . . . Me vienne voir: il voirra ma douleur, Et la rigeur de l’Archer qui me donte. Whoever would see how a god overwhelms me as he attacks me, . . . should come to see me: he will see my suffering and the rigor of the archer who tames me. Ronsard’s self-display emerges as exceptional when compared with Scève’s intellectual probing (“Qui veult scauoir par commune euidence” [Délie 278]), Tyard’s quiet diffidence (“Qui veult savoir en quante et quelle sorte” [Erreurs amoureuses 2]), and Du Bellay’s full-spirited rally in Olive (62). Du Bellay encompasses an entire poetic discourse that...

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